EasyMoney: Retail investors were “best thing” during pandemic
EasyMoney has said that remaining open to retail investors during the pandemic was the best thing for the platform and provided opportunities for experienced lenders.
Jason Ferrando, head of lending at EasyMoney, told Peer2Peer Finance News that during the first lockdown in March 2020 the platform had a series of conversations about whether or not to continue to accept retail money.
Around the same time, several other peer-to-peer lending platforms opted to pause their retail lending business, citing market instability and rising withdrawal requests. Funding Circle temporarily closed to retail investors in April 2020 and has yet to reopen, while Crowd2Fund, Assetz Capital, and LendingCrowd were among the platforms which paused their retail offering in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Zopa also stopped offering retail investments as a temporary measure, before opting to close its P2P business entirely by 31 January 2022.
“We had some internal battles, a lot of heavy discussions about whether we should follow everybody else or whether we should buck the trend and stay open,” Ferrando said.
Read more: EasyMoney launches app in response to investor demand
“In the end, we decided to stay open. And it worked out really well because even though we were seeing a huge amount of money being withdrawn, we wanted to save the money coming in. That was where our networks really did become a big help because when everybody was withdrawing, our experienced P2P investors saw the opportunities available and began investing more.
“I think staying open through lockdown was the biggest, best thing for us,” he added.
Earlier this year, EasyMoney reported that it had passed the £150m lending milestone and returned £10m in interest payments to its investors.
Last year, the platform announced that it had made a profit of £269,000 and paid out an average interest rate of 7.4 per cent during 2020, despite the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.